Apple 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Update Trouble

Upon trying to upgrade to the newest major update by Apple for OS X to 10.6.3 I had nothing but trouble.  Some Macs upgrade fine.  Others do not.

I always download the full combo update since I have hundreds of Macs to update it saves lots of time and bandwidth to just download the full update one time instead of a smaller update over and over again.  The combo update for the client is 713 MB.

When running it on my favorite iMac 24 which I use as my main workstation the GUI installer would fail within the first minute of the install during the “writing files” stage and had some useless error saying the installer had failed and that I needed to contact the software manufacturer (in this case Apple).  I tried all sorts of things and scoured the Internet as well as Apple’s site looking for help but since the update is so new there is very little info out there.  Hopefully this will help you if you’re having the same trouble!

Yet Another System Utility

I cleaned temp files and dumped cache folders and tried multiple accounts and ran cleanup utilities including YASU (http://jimmitchell.org/yasu/) which all helped the system but didn’t do anything for the update.  I even ran the software updater from the command line using “sudo softwareupdate -i -a” but all failed.

After about an hour of searching I found that if I didn’t close the installer after the error I could go to the menu bar and view the log file.  Silly me I knew it was there!  The log file told me that there was an error 23, too many open files in system.  There is very little info on this error 23 except that it is indeed too many open files in the system.  So after some more investigation I found the sysctl command.  By using sysctl kern.maxfiles you can see what your system is set at as far as the maximum allowed open files.  My iMac was at 2000 which seemed like more than enough but this was largest update I had attempted and I have LOTS of software on my iMac.  So I changed that value to 5000 using the command “sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5000″.  Understand this is done either under sudo or sudo su in a terminal window.

After changing the maxfiles to 5000 the updater ran without a hitch!  I’m not sure if I need to set that value back to 2000 but I’m going to leave it at 5000 since there should be plenty of system resources to handle it.  If I start to see system performance issues I will set it back to 2000.  I know most Linux systems are well under 1000 and some under 500 for max files so 5000 seems like overkill.

Please leave a comment if this fixed your issue or contact me if you need additional help!!

Popularity: 100% [?]

MacBook Pro Model A1211

I’ve now upgraded three of these MacBook Pro model A1211 Apple Laptops with extra RAM and a faster hard drive.  I’m as pleased with the results as when I did the first upgrade!!  The performance gains have been astonishing. If you haven’t yet, read my article about the performance change before and after the upgrade in the Upgrade your Macbook Pro article.

The machine I’m writing this on was a real pig and always seemed even slower than same generation Macbooks (although I’m sure that had to be in my mind).  Now it’s snappy and responsive even running both Windows 7 in VMWare along with all the other stuff I’m doing.

This particular upgrade means going from 2 gb of RAM to 4 and swapping out the old Hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm drive for a faster and larger Seagate 250 gb 7200 rpm drive.

The hardware upgrade is fairly easy on this model.  Just remove about 20 screws and the keyboard/trackpad assembly lifts up to expose the hard drive.  Disconnect a few cables, remove a few more screws and swap in the new HDD.  It’s of course the exact same size, just better.  Button everything back up.

One of the most recent ones need the OS installed on it from scratch so I just went about installing Snow Leopard on that one.  The second was a true upgrade and I needed to move all the data over to the new drive.  I have a USB HDD adapter that allows you to connect either a full size or laptop size HDD to the computer via a USB port.  Doing this allowed me to boot to the original HDD.  Once in the OS I used the Disk Utility to initialize and partition the new HDD.  Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the info onto the new drive.  Once it was complete (about one hour for 50 GB) I shutdown the Macbook, disconnected the USB HDD and booted normally into the OS.

Viola!  Full upgrade in about an hour and half.  The cost was about $150 per unit with shipping and all.  This is a small investment towards a computer that will last several more years!  My recommendation- upgrade your Macbook Pro.  Do it NOW!

Popularity: 26% [?]

Yes, upgrade your MacBook Pro… DO IT NOW!

Of course I’m talking about the older MacBook Pro, not the new aluminum block ones.

I was always very suprised that Apple didn’t put 7200 RPM hard drives in their MacBooks.  It wasn’t a matter of them not being available and must have had more to do with their internal purchasing.  BUT after upgrading my MacBook Pro I can tell from experience that not putting the 7200 RPM drives in from the factory was a mistake.  The performance gains were phenominal!!

So I fould lots of instructions on the web about how to do it and even YouTube videos which were great.  The main trouble I had was in moving the OS and data.  After some trial and error I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner and moving the entire old drive contents to the new drive which I had already formatted.  Anyway I’m rambling…

I ordered a 320 GB 7200 RPM HDD and a 4 GB memory kit from New Egg for under $140 with shipping.  I took extra care to benchmark prior to the upgrade using XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and got an overall score of 108.  After the upgrades I re-ran XBench and got a score of 127!!  Nearly a 20 point gain!!  If you haven’t used XBench before you won’t realize how huge of a gain that is, but believe me- it’s HUGE.  Now my old MacBook Pro that I’ve had for over 2 years out performs the newest iMacs coming out!  My XBench results on the new iMacs can be found in another post called “Are the newest iMacs any faster?”  Oddly enough the new iMacs actually score lower than my MacBook Pro did before the upgrade.  Figure that one out…

The laptop is like a new machine!  I strongly urge you to upgrade your old MacBook Pro.  You will be so happy and giggle with delight so much that a little pee will come out.

Check back soon as I will post the XBench results from the new aluminum MacBooks.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Exactly how much faster are the new iMacs that were just released a few weeks ago?  The answer: They’re Not…

I was so excited to get the newest iMac and evidently was one of the first because my order needed to be modified from what I had ordered and upgraded to a comporable nextgen.  After moving everything over to the new iMac using Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html and awesome software BTW) I ran XBench (http://www.xbench.com/).  Now it’s important to note that I had already installed XBench on my old iMac and there were absolutely no changes prior to re-running XBench on the new iMac.

To my great disappointment the XBench score was lower on the new iMac!

As you can see the only place the new iMac scored higher than the old one was under the Thread test!

The NVidia GeForce 9400 is only PCI where the ATI Radeon HD2400 is PCI Express at full x16 so even though the ATI is an older chipset and has 128 MB less VRAM it still out perfoms the NVidia.  I should also point out that the VRAM on this NVidia chip is shared with system ram where the ATI on the previous generation isn’t.  This explains exactly why the new system was using more RAM right out of the box!

So, don’t go rushing out ready to trade in your iMac for the new ones because the bottom line is that they just don’t perform as well as expected!  The exception to this would be in the new 24″ iMacs.  At least get the new iMac with the GeForce 120 or 130.  These have dedicated GDDR3 memory and are much better chipsets.

If you have one of the new 24″ iMacs please post your XBench results here!  I would love to see how much better they perform than the 20″ iMacs.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Apple introduced the revolutionary MacBook Wheel which eliminates the keyboard!

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When I asked my Apple sales rep if I should buy the current iMac or wait until a new one is released- he had the following to say, “I know there isn’t going to be a new iMac released this year… are you feeling me…?” This was his way of telling me that the new iMacs are going to be released very soon, most likely Q1 of 2009. more…

Popularity: 13% [?]